Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Lines

Image caption
PETER ZIMMERMANN

Lines

  • 2004
  • Epoxy resin and pigments on canvas
  • 250,7 x 160,5 cm
  • Cat. P_731
  • Acquired in 2006
By:
Beatriz Herráez

Lines (2004) is a painting created by applying and layering epoxy resin on a large canvas. Developed by Peter Zimmermann nearly two decades ago, this technique produces finishes of a tactile and visual quality that transport the viewer into an illusory space where forms seem to have been caramelised. Based on these premises, and striving for an increasingly distinctive execution – methodically perfected following the guidelines of industrial production – Zimmermann shapes a suggestive imagery populated by garish colours that overlap on the surfaces in a hardened transparency. In keeping with those guidelines, Lines exists in a space of tension between the abstract and the figurative, the technological and the craft-made. Organised as a weft of vertical lines that seem to codify a hidden second image encrypted behind the net of stylised forms, Lines can be described as a ‘surface painting’ constructed by means of the ‘disidentification’ of its referents.

Peter Zimmermann’s work in the 1980s was characterised by reproductions of figurative images – the covers of exhibition catalogues and artist monographs, travel books and dictionaries – but his subsequent works have ceased to contain recognisable referents and become abstracts, even though the emphasis is always on materials that come from ‘the real’, from the file prepared by the artist from his systematic online searches. The degree of credibility of the image, its dizzy circulation and obsolescence in the digital world and the question of authorship linked to the unique and the unreproducible are also themes stressed in his works.

Beatriz Herráez

 
By:
Beatriz Herráez
Peter Zimmermann
Freiburg Im Breisgau 1956

Peter Zimmermann studied at Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste in the German city of Stuttgart. Between 2000 and 2007 he taught at Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, the city in which he has lived for over three decades.

In the 1980s, Zimmermann’s work was part of the flourishing artistic scene in Cologne, to which he belonged but from which he also distanced himself as his reflective style was far removed from the neo-expressionist positions of some of his colleagues. His reproductions of book covers, art monographs and catalogues, dictionaries and travel guides, made with pigments and synthetic resins, are characteristic of that period. The series of posters and cardboard boxes also belong to that period. He used administrative aesthetics to question the authorship and reproducibility of images in the contemporary world.

These concerns are embodied in Zimmermann’s works by appropriating materials that are circulating online, which he transforms using various computer programs. This results in abstract paintings and interventions that turn the illusory nature and superficiality of images into problems, constructing a mindset that traps the gaze of the viewer by means of bright forms and colours.

Recent exhibitions of his work have been staged at the Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst (Otterndorf, Germany, 2016); the Charim Galerie (Vienna, 2016); and the Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg, Germany, 2016). He has taken part in group exhibitions at venues including the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain d’Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2012); the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Bielefeld, Germany, 2013); the Museum Weserburg (Bremen, Germany, 2011); and the Kunstmuseum Bonn (Bonn, Germany, 2009).

Beatriz Herráez

 
«Peter Zimmermann» (Lisbon, 2004).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.